Acceleration Sensor Archive

  • Separate Keitai: Meet Japan’s sexiest new handset (videos)

    Separate Keitai: Meet Japan’s sexiest new handset (videos)

    Posted on February 5, 2010 | No Comments
    For years, Japan was the innovation leader in the cell phone industry, until South Korea and the US started catching up rapidly. If you look back at what Nippon's mighty carriers have released in the past few months, you mainly see super-powerful handsets with large OLED screens, 12MP cameras, Blu-ray recorder connectivity, double digital TV tuners, etc. But the form factor never really changes, as the majority of Japanese consumers still demands clamshell phones with jog dials enabling them to conveniently thumb-text emails. But if a country churns out 100 different handsets per year, there have to be some exceptions. And the most notable exception (that now has been priced and dated) is Fujitsu's F-04B featuring the world's first separable two-module body.

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  • Video: Meet Palro, Fujisoft’s mini humanoid

    Video: Meet Palro, Fujisoft’s mini humanoid

    Posted on February 1, 2010 | No Comments
    Most of the robots we cover on CrunchGear have been built for research or entertainment purposes, but some of them do become available for the general public at some point. And today we can give you the Palro (Pal+robot) [JP], a soon to be marketed humanoid developed by Tokyo-based Fujisoft. The little guy stands 39.8cm tall, weighs 1.6kg and boasts a whole range of features: 20 joints, five mics, voice recognition, mono speakers, a 3MP camera, Wi-Fi IEE 802.11 b/g/n, a USB port, an Intel Atom 1.6GHz processor, 1GB internal memory, 4GB flash memory, Ubuntu OS, a gyro-sensor, a three-axis acceleration sensor, eight pressure sensors in his feet, a distance sensor in his head, and a 7.4V/2,800mAh lithium ion battery as his power source.

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  • Puyocon: Ball-shaped, squeezable input interface (videos)

    Puyocon: Ball-shaped, squeezable input interface (videos)

    Posted on January 12, 2010 | No Comments
    The Puyocon wants to be for PCs what the Wiimote became for game consoles: An alternative input interface that doesn't require pressing buttons but arm movements from users in order to control what's going on on the screen. The small device is the brainchild of the so-called Entertainment Computing Laboratory [JP] at Japan's Tsukuba University. The Puyocon is a ball-shaped, soft and wireless controller that users can roll, throw, squeeze or move with both hands in order to trigger an action on the screen (for example, moving a cursor around). It features a total of 14 pressure sensors, a three-way acceleration sensor and Bluetooth.

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  • New service enables total control of factory workers

    New service enables total control of factory workers

    Posted on July 3, 2009 | No Comments
    In principle, any advance in any field of technology is welcome, but I have my doubts about this new service developed by a Japanese company called DSS. It's basically aimed at establishing a "big brother"-like control system [JP, PDF] within factories.

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